> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://whales-investing.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 🐋 Banks Now Put AI Spending at $1.2 TRILLION by 2027 - URL: https://whales-investing.ghost.io/banks-now-put-ai-spending-at-12-trillion/ - Published: 2026-08-21T10:11:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T10:01:35.000Z - Description: And the Grid Operator's Capacity Auction Just Failed to Fill. - Author: Whales Investing - Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1787824651448, #Import 2026-08-27 10:01 ###### Desmond Hawk | August 21, 2026 --- **The Setup** ## The consumer, described four different ways Walmart closed the season yesterday with a quarter that was strong almost everywhere it counted. Revenue rose 5.9 percent. Global e-commerce grew 23 percent. The advertising business — now a meaningful share of operating profit — jumped 38 percent. Management raised full-year adjusted earnings guidance to $2.80–$2.87 from $2.75–$2.85, helped by tariff refunds. The stock fell anyway. US comparable sales grew 2.6 percent against the 3.5 percent analysts expected, with about 0.8 points of that shortfall coming from price caps on certain drugs hitting the health and wellness business. Third-quarter guidance of 3.0 to 3.75 percent sales growth also landed below the roughly 5 percent Wall Street had penciled in for the year. When the largest retailer on earth — one that sees around 280 million customers a week — guides conservatively into back-to-school and the holidays, the market listens to that rather than to the beat. One detail from Walmart’s quarter deserves separating out, because it explains why the market treated a beat as bad news. Roughly a third of the company’s operating income now comes from advertising and membership rather than from selling goods — businesses that scale with attention rather than shelf space. Advertising grew 38 percent. Yet none of that offset a comparable-sales figure nearly a full point below forecast, which tells you what investors are actually underwriting: not Walmart’s ability to monetise its traffic, but whether that traffic is still growing. Put the whole week together and you get the most complete picture of the American household available anywhere. Home Depot beat on Tuesday, but its growth came from bigger baskets rather than more shoppers: average ticket up 2.8 percent, customer transactions down 1.0\. Target beat and raised guidance on Wednesday. Lowe’s beat on profit the same morning and cut its full-year outlook. Walmart beat, raised, and got sold. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/21149299-81fa-41e4-8fd9-85ef36098a81_3200x2212.png) The through-line is that households are still spending, but with sharper elbows. Everyday and off-price retail is holding; discretionary and housing-linked categories are not. That is consistent with what the government data has been saying all month: prices running at 3.4 percent against wage growth of 3.2, real average hourly earnings 0.2 percent lower than a year ago, retail sales down 0.6 percent in July, sentiment at 51. Which surfaces the question I get more than any other from readers in this position. When the paycheck stops keeping pace with the shelf, the arithmetic only improves if something other than the paycheck starts paying. That’s why income produced by owning a piece of productive infrastructure — rather than by selling more hours — keeps drawing attention, and it’s the premise of the first item on my desk today. --- **SPONSORED** **Editor's Note:** Robert Kiyosaki, author of *Rich Dad Poor Dad*, the #1 personal finance book of all time with over 40 million copies sold, has spent decades teaching everyday Americans how the wealthy actually build income. He called the 2008 housing crash before it happened, warned investors to buy gold and silver well before their historic runs, and has been pounding the table on cash-flowing assets for over 30 years. Today, he'll show you an income play funded entirely by America's oil and gas infrastructure. One that's already paying some investors $25,000 a month and is the closest thing to universal basic income that may ever exist. [**Click here to see the details**](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a69edc9cafda64939f911f9?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=FFMF5&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) or read more below. --- There are two possible paths to Universal Basic Income (UBI) in America. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/d54832bb-b83f-4b29-b668-d440bc9efdd3_1000x563.png)](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a69edc9cafda64939f911f9?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=FFMF5%5FIM&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) Path #1: Wait for Elon Musk's robots to take over the economy, hope the government figures out how to redistribute AI-generated wealth, and pray it happens before you're 85. Path #2: Enroll in what I call the Patriot Income Plan (P.I.P.) and start collecting 10% a year from America's oil and gas infrastructure immediately. 42 payouts a year. Deposited automatically into your account. There are zero requirements on your end. All you need is a photo ID, bank account, social security number, and permanent address. That's it. One P.I.P. investor collects $4,800 a month. Another pulls in $25,000. A guy named Weston says he collects $350,000 a year. I can't verify these claims since they're from the wild west of the Internet. But I don't doubt them either. Musk has been tweeting about UBI for a decade. These investors have been collecting it. The next P.I.P. payout is already on the calendar. Enrollment is easy. [Click Here to See the Details](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a69edc9cafda64939f911f9?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) --- **By the Numbers** ## The AI build-out has stopped being a money problem While retail was reporting, the estimates for what artificial intelligence will cost to build kept climbing. JPMorgan now models roughly $697 billion of data-centre capital spending in the United States this year. Goldman Sachs puts global investment near $1 trillion for 2026\. Bank of America sees a path toward approximately $1.2 trillion by 2027. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/7b6ef18c-41ba-4dec-9a8d-9d4401184a13_3200x1968.png) Here is the part that matters more than the headline number. Capital is no longer the binding constraint. Chips remain in short supply, construction firms report a shortage of skilled electrical labour that keeps projects from finishing on customer timelines, and the grid itself has become the bottleneck. Wholesale electricity prices near major data-centre hubs have risen by as much as 267 percent since 2020, driven by transformer shortages and interconnection queues. PJM — the operator covering thirteen states and the largest such market in the country — held a capacity auction that cleared at record prices and still failed to procure enough capacity to meet its own reliability targets. The Energy Information Administration projects record American electricity consumption in both 2025 and 2026. There is a useful scale check on those numbers. A trillion dollars of annual data-centre spending is roughly comparable to the entire annual revenue of Walmart, the largest retailer on the planet — being deployed each year into buildings that produce no consumer goods at all. The electricity those buildings draw is measured against the consumption of small cities, and unlike a factory they run at full load around the clock. This is why the constraint migrated from balance sheets to substations within about eighteen months. The political response has been uneven. New York State imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centres amid public backlash over local power bills, while at the federal level the direction is the opposite — fast-tracking capacity on the argument that losing the AI race is the greater risk. What almost nobody in that argument disputes is the physics: models this large need firm, always-on power in quantities intermittent sources cannot supply alone, which has pulled fuels the market wrote off a decade ago back into the conversation. The second item on my desk today comes directly out of that shift. --- **SPONSORED** Wall Street spent a decade declaring the end of coal. Then the AI revolution hit a brick wall. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/518ea817-5bfc-48da-831f-51d79edf39a3_2922x1290.png)](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a7074119108939b520e46a2?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=PAFRO602%5FIM&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) Data centers running advanced AI models are draining power grids at a rate America hasn't seen in generations. Even Washington acknowledges that coal must power this tech boom. Instead of burning dirty coal, a patented process called **FASForm™ technology** fractionates raw coal into clean hydrogen, jet fuel, and ultra-low sulfur diesel. It turns raw coal into a zero-emission engine targeting a **$2.1 trillion global commodity market**. Frontieras North America is already building an [**$850 million commercial plant in West Virginia**](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a7074119108939b520e46a2?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=PAFRO602&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) to lead this energy revival. They've raised $45M+ from 14,000 investors, backed by a $150M commitment, and reserved the **NASDAQ ticker "FASF"**. Current private round shares are available directly to individual investors at **$9.87 per share**. [**Claim your pre-IPO shares at $9.87 before the offering closes August 27th.**](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/6a7074119108939b520e46a2?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=PAFRO602&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### *This is a paid advertisement for Frontieras’s Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at* ###### https://invest.frontieras.com/ *Reservation of the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that we will be listed on the NASDAQ. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.* *Under Regulation A, a company may change its share price by up to 20% without requalifying the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.* *Sources\* The global market for our products is worth a combined value of over $2.1 trillion* ###### [*GlobeNewsWire.com - Business Outlook and Forecast 2027*](https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/3/24/2409228/0/en/Global-Diesel-Market-Size-To-Surpass-US-1269-87-Billion-By-2027-Europe-Having-Share-About-25-Leading-Players-Strategies-Covid-19-Outbreak-Growth-Opportunities-Emerging-Trends-Segme.html?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### [*MarketsAndMarkets.com - Hydrogen Market Size, Share & Trends*](https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/hydrogen-market-132975342.html?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### [*TransparencyMarketResearch.com - Naphtha Market*](https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/naphtha-market.html?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### [*FortuneBusinessInsights.com - Aviation Fuel Market Size and Industry Overview*](https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/aviation-fuel-market-100427?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### [*MarketResearchFuture.com - Anthracite Market Summary*](https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/anthracite-market-2742?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) ###### [*PrecedenceResearch.com - What is the Fertilizer Market Size?*](https://www.precedenceresearch.com/fertilizer-market?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) --- **The Other Angle** ## Every one of these numbers measures the same thing Step back from the week and notice what the reports actually have in common. Walmart’s comparable sales, Home Depot’s average ticket, the electricity price near a data centre in Virginia, the 3.4 percent on the consumer price index — all of them are measurements of one variable, which is what a dollar buys and how fast that is changing. The market currently prices better than a 70 percent chance the Fed does nothing in September, and a rate increase no earlier than the start of next year. Yet the 30-year Treasury yield this week reached its highest level in nearly two decades. Short-term policy expectations have relaxed while the price of long money has risen — the bond market’s way of saying the inflation problem outlives this rate cycle regardless of what happens at the September meeting. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/d0a91507-87ba-411d-ba3a-3679c0daf596_3200x2212.png) The scale of that erosion is easier to feel than to see. At 3.4 percent inflation, prices double roughly every twenty-one years. At the 2 percent the Fed formally targets, it takes about thirty-five. That difference — a little over one percentage point — is fourteen years of purchasing power, and it accrues to whoever holds the debt rather than whoever holds the savings. Nothing about it appears on a statement; it shows up only when you compare what a fixed sum covered five years ago against what it covers now. For anyone holding savings rather than trading them, that is the whole game — not the direction of any single index, but the slow arithmetic of a currency losing ground faster than income replaces it. It compounds quietly and it never announces itself on a specific day. The final item on my desk today takes up exactly that question. --- **SPONSORED** **How the Government is Robbing You Blind: And Calling It “Inflation”** [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/1acea4e6-0caa-4037-8a20-9115948e2abd_1274x714-jpeg.jpg)](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/69fe09d16ab8b07391011256?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=FDGS601%5FIM&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) Every time they print another trillion, your savings shrink. Prices climb, your dollar weakens, [**and no one in Washington lifts a finger**](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/69fe09d16ab8b07391011256?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=FDGS601&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) Inflation is a weapon, not a side effect. And while they cash in, you lose buying power every single day. [**This free guide exposes the scam**](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/69fe09d16ab8b07391011256?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=38WIS&type=BLOG&product=FDGS601&ref=whales-investing.ghost.io), reveals how much you're really losing, and shows how to protect what's yours before it vanishes. [Get Free Reports Now](https://blog.whalesinvesting.net/69fe09d16ab8b07391011256?ref=whales-investing.ghost.io) --- > *The largest retailer on earth grew revenue by almost six percent and lost ground on the one line that measures how many people bought more. That gap — between the company’s number and the customer’s — has been the story of every report this month.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/75/59/7559d400-2a6f-46d2-ac27-e1ef5889487c/content/images/2026/08/38e60707-929c-4796-8092-24916407130d_1024x572-jpeg.jpg) --- **The Bottom Line** ## Guidance beat the beat, all week long Four of the largest retailers in America reported into the same economy within seventy-two hours, and all four beat expectations — because expectations had already been lowered. The information was never in the beat. It was in what management said about the next six months, and there the four split cleanly: reaffirmed, raised, cut, and raised-but-cautious. Markets rewarded exactly one of them. Underneath the consumer story sits a physical one that will outlast it. The AI build-out has moved past being a financing question into being an engineering and permitting question — power, transformers, electricians, interconnection queues. Estimates of a trillion dollars in annual spending are easy to write and hard to energise, and the places where that spending lands are already seeing wholesale power prices multiples above where they sat five years ago. That cost does not stay inside the data centre; it arrives on residential bills in the same states. Next week resolves more than this one did. Nvidia’s results and core PCE land within hours of each other on the 26th, Jackson Hole follows on the 27th with Chair Warsh’s first keynote, and the last inflation reading before the Fed decides arrives September 11\. Today’s flash purchasing-manager surveys give the first read on August activity. Protect first. Position for the regime you’re actually in, and read the outlook rather than the quarter — because the quarter that just ended is already history, and guidance is the only forward-looking number in any release. Because the capital you keep is the only capital that compounds. — Hawk [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)